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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Something I discovered within the past year is that if I know a song fairly well, I can "play it" silently in my head, and be entertained. The experience isn't quite as emotionally resonate as listening with headphones, but it's not so far off either. It's useful when I'm bored.

...can anyone else do this? I actually find it supremely weird.

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No, I think that's pretty normal. I do it all the time.

I can even "compose" my own music (it can be any genre, with any type of instruments, and even include voices), but I have no ability to play instruments myself. I'd love to get into music, but just don't have the time.

My literature professor back in college said he "listened to" classical music in his head during his morning runs. I just assumed everyone did it based on sample size 2.

Man I can't even imagine. I realize a while back that I don't actually hear music in my head when I have an earworm, instead I hear a representation of it made entirely of what would be vocalized sounds. So if I'm hearing the guitar solo from November Rain, its kind of like someone (me, really) going 'bowwwww owww nah nahhhh nah nahahhhhhhh wan nah nah nah nah wah wah' rather than actual guitar noises, but then it's followed up by the singers legitimate voice.

My wife found this pretty weird. I suspect it's related to my also experiencing aphantasia. It could be some form of mental lossy compression, where the brain knows it can roughly replicate what it heard using the limited set of vocalizations it already knows instead of actual note/instrument combinations.

I think you're right. It might also partially be an acquired skill. As a musician I hear a lot more details in music than a non-trained ear normally would. This naturally makes it easier for me to recall music with more detail. If you aren't trained and have a low level of musicality then I would assume you'd only memorize/remember the main parts of the song/passage, like the "sound" of the guitar playing that solo, whereas I hear the piano comping (or is it just another guitar? I remember piano :D), bass & drums, all while picturing how to actually play the solo on the guitar.

Like a non-musician hearing a guitar riff would just replay it as "nana nana na, na-naa" or something simple whereas I would be able to hear it in exact detail and how it interacts with the rest of the band melodically as well as rhythmically.

I'd like to explore this aphantasia idea a bit more. I would classify myself as very visual, but on thinking about this more ... it's not like I have a high-fidelity visual impression of the imagined object in my mind's eye. It's more like a physical / tactile impression of presence. Is that what it's like for you?

As I'm sitting here, I'm thinking of describing it as ... If I shut my eyes I still know roughly where the monitor corners, the keyboard, the table corners, the wine-bottle, the apple, etc. are. It's not like I'm seeing them, but I can spatially query them and perform operations on them. So is this a difference in internal perception, or is it a difference in how we describe those internal states?

I think in a very spatial way. I can roughly imagine objects or scenes as something like a 3d graph of connected points. I can imagine the facade of my house if I close my eyes only by sort of tracing its shape, in which case I can feel my eyes moving along that dimension as I do it. I cannot imagine a person's actual face, which I'm told is really weird, although I'm very good with recognizing them when I'm shown them. I can generally map out a location as if I was overhead once i've walked through it, but only really as a spatial scene. Closing my eyes is kind of what I imagine its like to be blind.

For very simple objects, I can vaguely visualize them like a drawing from an early 80's graphics demo, but that's about as good as it gets.

See, what intrigues me about this is I wonder if you're just more nuanced and precise in your description. I always thought of myself as being very visual, and I'm like ninety-nine point something percent of spatial ability, and yet your description seems like a fairly accurate description of what I experience.

The problem is that the descriptions depend on so many subjective things. For instance what does it mean to be able to see someone's face in one's mind? At what resolution question mark at what level of detail? I mean it seems like a lot of people with uncorrected vision can't even see faces to any standards I would consider seeing. So could it be that you're holding your mental visualizations too too high a bar and comparing them with people you have a low bar for mental visualizations?

Edit .. your description of having to trace out the facade is particularly apt to me. It's almost like some kind of DRAM thing where I have to refresh my mental image by touching / scanning parts of it or it goes away.

That's what I always thought originally, but from when I've spoken with other people about it, it's not the normal way of 'visualizing'. In particular, not being able to do things like imagine a persons face is pretty odd. Similarly, when i'm told to "imagine you're in your childhood bedroom" or "imagine you are on a hot desert island", I can't get anything going, while I'm told most people will construct a detailed mental scenery of it.

Like growing up, I always assumed that those scenes where someone's imagination goes wild and they envision other characters doing crazy things (see: the entirety of Scrubs) were just a literary device, but apparently that's at least sort of close to how a normal brain actually works.

The DRAM comparison is pretty good. Or like having a plastic film over the world that you need to press down on to see anything through.

> its kind of like someone (me, really) going 'bowwwww owww nah nahhhh nah nahahhhhhhh wan nah nah nah nah wah wah' rather than actual guitar noises, but then it's followed up by the singers legitimate voice.

That is super interesting!

I would assume that if you audiolize instruments as you making instruments sounds with your mouth, you would audiolize other people as you mimicking them as well...

I mean, when I read your post above, my inner voice does it in a neutral me voice, because I have no clue what you actually sound like. But if I read a text message or something from a friend of mine, I read it in their voice, because I know what they sound like.

Can you also imagine your friends' voices?

If I try to do it right now, I can only really generate a sort of average tone that I associate with them, or maybe a phrase they say commonly. I can't really synthesize a new sentence though, so there's something in there relating to memorability too. If I try to imagine my wife saying things that I know for a fact she said this morning, I just hear myself imitating her.

Maybe it's a combination of both, and you're just more attuned to the nuance? It's funny, when you mentioned November Rain I did the guitar noises, in my voice, in my head. Great, now that's stuck in there. Thanks. But something like the Star Wars sound-track. I do hear a more instrumental version, although for parts that I can sing I also get some ghostly sensations in my tongue and throat.

>No, I think that's pretty normal. I do it all the time.

[Edit: Currently I "listen" to a lot of Georgios Papadopoulos, heh!]

>I can even "compose" my own music

I can relate! Unfortunately, I'm totally untrained regarding music. I once tried to enter one of the melodies in my head (simplified) into a music program, and it took forever, because I had to find the correct notes by trial and error: "Not that one. Neither that one. Still wrong. Not quite. This one is it! Next note..."

I think this kind of trial and error is actually the best way of learning an instrument. My guitar teacher did exactly what you did (but on a keyboard) when he was a kid, and even got feedback from his parents on whether he hit the right keys. He's a hell of a guitar player now, surely among the (subjectively) very best in my country.

> I had to find the correct notes by trial and error: "Not that one. Neither that one. Still wrong. Not quite. This one is it! Next note..."

I've tried that and it's so slow and frustrating that the melody in my head just disappears.

> it's so slow and frustrating that the melody in my head just disappears.

Use a microphone to record yourself humming the melody first, so you can get the original back if you forget it.

Separately, I'll mention that imitone (https://imitone.com) works surprisingly well. The transcriptions don't come out perfectly by any means, but they provide a base that you can then clean up.

Logic also has this functionality built in

For instructions on using Logic Pro X to convert humming to MIDI notes, see https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/131522/21473 (an answer I wrote).

I cannot 'play music in my head'. I can recall vaguely what it felt like to have been listening to a specific piece of music, but not much further than that.

Possibly related, I have a very poor ability to visualise anything internally. (I cannot, for example, "picture a beach in my head")

In fact, most things I try to hold in my head evince nothing more than a foggy recollection.

It has been this way for as long as I can remember.

I'm a drummer and my wife always gets mad at me for drumming on things. I have a song in my head and can hear all the parts really well even over whatever sounds my taps are making. So in my head I'm drumming along and it sounds super good, but to the rest of the world it's just monotone taps on a table or whatever.

I do the same, but unintentionally and the songs that seem to pop into my head are all songs I hate. It's incredibly rare that my favorites end up playing, but rather repetitive Pop crap. This isn't even a comment about Pop Music, as even though I don't really listen to Pop, I've heard plenty that I like. But not the songs that fly around in my head all day; Pure garbage.

Edit: As I was typing this, "La Macarena" popped into my head.

I specifically avoid viral earworm songs because I am very prone to getting them stuck in my head. I can have the same song playing "in the background" non-stop in my mind for days. I have songs in my dreams and I'll wake up with them still playing in my head. Sometimes it will just be a single bar of a song, or just a piece of it looping.

To this day, I have never once listened to "Chocolate Rain" or Rebecca Black's "Friday" because I fear never being able to turn them off. (I avoided Taylor Swift for, like a decade, but now just thinking about means I've got "Shake it Off" playing.)

Writing this out now makes me realize how weird this all sounds...

I have the exact same experience. It may even, unintentionally, be the _reason_ I don't listen to Pop music. It's generally not even a whole song - usually not even the chorus. I'll get a 2-4 second loop in my head of some insignificant section of a crappy song for 2 or 3 whole days.

Like you, it will sometimes start when I'm sleeping. I won't remember much of the dream, but the song is still there, echoing as it was in whatever setting my dream took place.

I heard a parody of a Justin Bieber song about 4 days ago and it's still playing, send help.

Since I don't know the song it is of course just the chorus.

I also get ear worms, although not as bad as you seem to get them.

One trick that works for me is to over-saturate your brain with it. Got an annoying song on your mind? Find it in spotify, put on headphones, and listen to it on repeat until you're sick of it.

Funny anecdote. Back when I worked at EA, a couple of guys hacked together a system to share music on the internal LAN. (This was before the days of Spotify and friends.) Everyone would put their ripped albums on it and anyone could listen to anyone's stuff. It was pretty rad.

They also added some metrics tracking so you could look people up and see how many different albums they'd listened to, how many times, etc. There were leaderboards for who could cover the most stuff.

I thought it would be funny to "win" by listening to "Butterfly" by Smile.dk[0] more than any other song had been listened to. It listened to it on a loop for weeks. I, for reasons I cannot really explain years later, actually did listen to it and not just let it play at zero volume. It was a weird experiment in neurological satiation. At some point, it no longer annoyed because it just was, like the sound of my own heartbeat.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzcvRDWgRIE

Thank you for reminding me of Chocolate Rain... :/

I've also had songs get stuck in my head for as long as I can remember. What surprised me was the realization that I could (A) consciously initiate and turn off a mind-song, and (B) actually be entertained by the mind-song.

My "mind's eye" is pretty strong as well, but I would never mentally look at a painting or watch a movie to pass the time. Yet it seems to work for music.

The way I solved this is by stopping completely to listen to pop songs. I will actively avoid the radio or web stations so I won't be "contaminated" by these cheap songs. I actively look for more complex music: jazz/classical style and similar.

I once read that to get the loop out of your head, you have to "finish" the song, i.e. play it to the end, either in your head, sing it or play it on the stereo.

Works reasonably well for me.

Yup, have been able to do that as long as I remember. It's great for pub quizzes where they play the start of a song, I listen to the rest in my head until I've worked out the song's name.

Isn't this the experience of getting a song "stuck in your head?"

Depends if you can turn it on or off. I used to have songs stuck in my head when younger. Now I can more or less stop or start it on command.

I have experienced something similar, namely hypnagogic hallucinations, usually when waking up, that sound exactly note for note the same as the recordings. Strawberry Fields Forever was the most memorable. To my mind experiences like this and particularly vivid dreams show that our mental capacity for self-stimulating is profoundly more extensive than most people believe. I can't think of any reason why you couldn't have a kind of state of lucid wakefulness effectively functioning as an overlay of what your sense organs are telling you. Imagine for example a race car driver who sees the line as clearly as in one of the simulation games that enables it.

Edit: I've also had vivid hypnagogic visual hallucinations intentionally. It's a kind of fun game to play, seeing my bedroom clearly with my eyes closed, or checking the time on my watch while same. Obviously I'm conscious and aware that I'm not really checking the actual time, but not particularly surprisingly I'm pretty close since I tend to wake about the same time every day.

In case you're interested: "hypnogogic" refers to experiences you have while falling asleep. The word for experiences you have while waking up is "hypnopompic".

"The hypnagogic state is rational waking cognition trying to make sense of non-linear images and associations; the hypnopompic state is emotional and credulous dreaming cognition trying to make sense of real world stolidity." [1]

Thank you for the clarification. I've never noticed any distinction between these two states. Perhaps that's why I conflate them. I suppose that stands to my point about the richness of autostimulated experiences.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompic

My wife doesn't like listening to music in the car, but one of the local radio stations will show the title/artist on the center console. So I put the radio on with the volume at 0, I hear the song in my head, and she has silence :)

Yeah I can also do this (sometimes), the experience is the same as yours: I can't quite emotionally resonate with the song as I would if I were hearing it IRL, but if I know the song quite well I can get all the details right.

It is particularly intriguing to be able to "sing" using other people's voices, since the lyrics of the song "feel" the same way as my inner voice, passing through (I assume) the brain's phonological loop.

Once I had this really weird experience, where in certain conditions, certain muscles would resonate exactly with the song playing in my brain (and not just the rythm, even minor details were somewhat transferred, as if my brain was redirecting raw PCM audio from my brain directly to the nerves); I was really excited about this, as there was potential for a direct non-invasive neural interface to my brain, capable of extracting original songs directly from my brain without any instruments; unfortunately I could not replicate this weird behaviour reliably, and I also felt a bit weird in my brain when trying to do so, so I just dropped the matter.

I haven't done it for many years but you've reminded me that I could sometimes play songs in my head and actually hear it. Only very softly though, like old-fashioned headphones on a very low volume.

I still have music in my head very often - I play piano and I'm always getting ear worms, but it must be at least 20 years since I last physically heard my mental music playing. I wonder if I can get it back?

I cannot do this at all. Wish I could.

But have you heard of Bob Milne? He can listen to four different symphonies in his head at the same time: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/14867...

I do this almost all day every day. With practice you can actually do edits pitch shifts rearrangements, etc.

I'm the same way. I can keep myself pretty occupied just playing through songs in my head.

This is the norm for me. If I am awake, I almost always have music playing in my head, from pop songs to classical to little nondescript melodies. Sometimes this can be quite annoying.

When you say play do you mean like a musician or do you mean like hitting play on a music player, if the latter I can do that, I suppose what would stop people is not a good memory for music.

Absolutely. I work extremely long hours, so I've noticed that when I'm particularly tired, my "mental iPod shuffle", as I call it, will go into extreme mode. Sometimes reading a single word or sentence is enough to remind me of a song, and BOOM it's immediately playing in my head.

I now basically have actual music on nearly 24/7 to drown that out otherwise it can get pretty annoying – especially if the song that's stuck in my head isn't one I actually enjoy.

Yep, I do this. In fact, sometimes when I'm meditating and focusing on my breath, I start hearing a song. I often ask, "Is that still being mindful or is it cheating?" I usually settle on cheating and my brain tries to focus in on the breath again. Sometimes I just let it play.

You know what's really weird? If I don't know all the lyrics to a song, I can sometimes listen to it in my head and hear the parts of the song I don't consciously remember.

Yes, I think the inability to do this seems to be associated with aphantasia. Most people do not have aphantasia, therefore I'd expect most people are able to do this.

I think similarly that most people who do not have an internal dialogue experience aphantasia - the ability to replay or simulate sensory experiences mentally. Personally I do not often have thoughts "racing" through my head - maybe one main one, maybe zero - and I think this related to my aphantasia.

Most well-trained musicians can read a score and construct the sounds mentally. It's an essential skill for composers and conductors, and useful for others.

In the aphantasia discussions that are closely related to this, it was revealed that some graphical artists have it and actually can't visualize things in their head, yet they're able to draw things on command.

Which is completely mind-boggling to me.

So there's probably people who can compose music without being able to audiolize it in their heads first, as strange as that sounds.

I find that if I'm in a noisy environment, like a moving car, if I think hard about a song, it feels like I can faintly hear it. I guess it's a side effect of the brain trying to find a recognizable pattern in the noise. I used to especially appreciate this in the days before it was easy to actually hear any song on demand, when I would have had to either buy the album or record the song off the radio.

This is reasonably common, especially among people with musical training. Some particularly gifted musicians can even parallelize the process:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/14867...

I can play a whole song in my head, and then realize that I don't know the words, and when I try to get the words out of the song in my head, I can't understand them, because my brain only committed the musical parts, not the lyrical parts.

I can even hear the vocals, they're just gibberish until I make a conscious effort to memorize them.

I can do this too. I also will sometimes unconsciously bop along to the music.

One time, a friend's Dad asked me why I was rocking back and forth. I think he thought I had a nervous tick. In reality, I was "listening to a song" and didn't even realize I was moving along to it. Seems to happen most often when I'm bored.

The Hamilton soundtrack has been playing in my head since I last heard it last week. Send help!

Yep, I can totally do this. It's normally not the whole song, just a section of it (but that doesn't bother me). It's a particularly common thing for me to do in bed, using the last song I heard that day.

I use this as a way to easily drown out other thoughts by focusing on the "mind radio".

I should add that I find myself with a song stuck in my head all the time as well.

Yes definitely. I also can 'play' a piano with my fingers, on a tabletop or just by slightly flexing a finger, and hear the notes in my head

> can anyone else do this?

I do it frequently. Sometimes I can't stop myself from doing it, which can be annoying.

I found that when some particular song is getting too much of my internal "air time", the best way to get rid of it is actually to find it (personal collection, youtube, google music, spotify - whatever you are using) and just to listen to it from beginning to the end. HTH.

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